Untreatable Gonorrhea a Global Threat

June 6, 2012 -- Gonorrhea is fast becoming untreatable, spurring an urgent call to action by the World Health Organization (WHO).

The WHO alert follows an even more strident warning by CDC researcher Gail A. Bolan, MD, and colleagues.

"It is time to sound the alarm," Bolan and colleagues wrote last February in the New England Journal of Medicine. Resistance to all known antibiotics, they warn, is "threatening our ability to cure gonorrhea."

By 2007, gonorrhea became resistant to fluoroquinolones, including ciprofloxacin.

When the dust cleared, there was only one line of defense against gonorrhea: third-generation cephalosporin antibiotics. The currently recommended cephalosporins are injectable ceftriaxone (preferred) and oral cefixime.

Untreatable Gonorrhea

Now wily gonorrhea bugs are becoming resistant to these drugs, too. Cefixime resistance increased 17-fold from 2006 to the first six months of 2011. Ceftriaxone resistance increased 10-fold.

Overall, less than 2% of gonorrhea are resistant to cefixime and only 0.5% are resistant to ceftriaxone. So why all the worry?

In the western U.S. -- and among men who have sex with men -- gonorrhea is becoming cephalosporin resistant much faster. It's the same pattern seen when the bug became resistant to fluoroquinolones.

As far as the CDC knows, there haven't yet been any treatment failures -- persistent gonorrhea despite treatment -- in the U.S. But then, only 2% of known U.S. gonorrhea cases are included in the CDC's gonorrhea surveillance program.

And treatment failures already have been seen in Japan, Norway, and the U.K. It's only a matter of time before the bug builds enough resistance to shrug off all existing treatments.

"The trends in decreased [cephalosporin] susceptibility that we're seeing, coupled with the history of emerging resistance and reported treatment failures in other countries, point to the likelihood of [U.S.] treatment failures on the horizon and the need for urgent action to prevent untreatable gonorrhea," CDC spokeswoman Nikki Mayes tells WebMD via email.